Splitting (22 page)

And it’s true that Jelly is the kind of woman who has few friends: who gets up in the morning, enjoys a solitary breakfast, feels the satisfaction of a good day’s work, buys the cat food and goes home on public transport. She is not a compulsive telephone talker; she does not like sharing and caring with just anyone; she enjoys a flirtation because she can see that sooner or later she will need to get married and have children, and anyone likes to be admired and to be in control. But Jelly does not particularly need or enjoy the running commentary on life that friends require and provide: the oohs and ahs and guess what she said, and he didn’t, did he, the bastard; how could she, the bitch! that others seem to enjoy: she is not, frankly, interested in very much or curious about others. She likes to look neat and sweet, and she is certainly not above spying and prying because this too gives her power: she likes to have secrets, she is secretive; she likes to know secrets, to have them in her possession but not pass them on. But she has learned her lesson about friends. They can and will betray you, and though you offer loyalty, loyalty is not necessarily offered in return. Judas Iscariot didn’t care about the money: he just wanted Jesus up there on the cross. The closer you nurture the worm to your bosom, the more likely it is to bite.

Seek solitude, thinks Jelly. Jelly doesn’t feel all that much: she prefers to think. Lady Rice finds her insensitive.

As for Angelica—well, Angelica always had friends. After she became Lady Rice, she gathered around her all the bohemians in the area; such writers, painters, sculptors, weavers, cookery experts, TV directors there were to be found. All she needed, after her years as a pop star amongst people whose favorite phrase was “know what I mean”—because passion and puzzlement so outstripped their command of the language—was a dinner table. Over eleven years these bohemians became her old friends. Even Edwin found them lively, and would come home saying “Who’s coming to dinner tonight? Well? Well?” rather than just “What’s for dinner?” The talk would be about books, films, reviews, politics, the world of the imagination: not horses, dogs, weather and crops, and required more keeping up with, but Edwin did not at the time complain. Edwin read books, he read poems—though he found his legs too long for theater seats, and his knees twitched at the cinema.

Edwin was to revert later, of course, to type, to his original state; was to put the Jaguar behind him to go back to the Range Rover: to the wuff-wuffing insolence of the hunt, the tearing to pieces of hungry beasts: the pop-popping of shotguns, the bringing of the soaring spirit dead or dying back to earth, if only to show who’s who round here. We, the hunting/shooting/landowning gentry.

Imagination hurt: that was why sensible people discouraged it. Speculation unsettled: certainty helped you sleep at night. If you shot wild creatures, you were less likely to shoot your wife, less likely to lose her in the first place. For these changes in Edwin, this regression, Lady Rice blamed Susan and Lambert almost more than she blamed Anthea. Anthea at least acknowledged herself as an enemy; Susan posed as a friend.

Angelica had only by accident been a pop star, Edwin would explain to everyone, trustingly, in the warm bright days when others were still to be trusted. A teenage girl of wit and temperament which far exceeded that of her parents, a rarity, a talent; her father dying, herself led astray—not sexually, of course; she wasn’t like that; discrimination was Angelica’s middle name. “Discrimination is Angie’s middle name,” he’d say, and Susan would nod her ever so slightly patronizing head, with its bell of heavy blonde hair: or turn her bright bird eyes on Angelica and smile sweetly and say, “oh me, I’m hopeless; anything at all makes me happy” and all the men around would wish they’d be the anyone to make her happy, their things the anything; and sometimes Angelica wondered if Edwin should be included in “all the men,” but surely not, Susan was her best friend. Best friends were not like that.

Angelica, in The Claremont, deciding that too much discrimination had been her downfall, refrained from calling room service to say her club sandwich was horrid, would they take it away and replace the smoked bacon with unsmoked. She controlled herself.

“V
ERBAL ASSAULT,” EDWIN HAD
claimed. That she had verbally assaulted him. What can he have meant? Lady Rice thought and thought. She was, truth to tell, no longer so much concerned with the matter of alimony as she had been. For all her fine words, for all the apparent finality of her opinions on the subject—as if she had reached some mountain peak of truth and there was no going down again; you were obliged to spin forever around your conclusions—the subject had ceased to be obsessional. She would leave all that legal stuff for Jelly to get on with; she would leave Angelica with the burden of looking up old friends, and the attempt to restore the integrity of the self before marriage—a silly slip of a girl in a leather jacket with rings in her nose—and get on with the task of considering her guilt, her possible contribution to the breakup of the marriage: not that she believes she can have had any part in that: no, it is just that remorse, or the appearance of remorse, might win her husband back—not that she wants that either, no, never—

In the Velcro Club, where the hearts and souls of those sundered or about to be put asunder, are understood, it is well known that obsessions are as changeable as the weather: and that the change is as painful as if the Velcro were alive, a million nerve endings twanging, and the shift from one obsession to the next hurts terribly as the stuff goes
skew-whiff,
and a screaming fills the air, too high-pitched to be quite heard, but there, there—verbal assault. Was she ever rude to Edwin? Did she ever berate him, insult him? Surely not. “Flop and wobble,” she’d once said to him, and he’d taken that amiss. Flop and wobble.

“Flop and wobble,” Angelica’s mother would say, surveying the jellies her little daughter loved so much. Mrs. Lavender White, nee Lamb, would often make such a hopeless dessert, incompetently if devotedly, for Saturday tea—alternately soft red, acid green. “Flop and wobble,” she’d complain. “How does it happen?” A rhetorical question her little daughter saw fit to answer one day: “You don’t put enough of the packet in,” Angelica said. “It’s obvious, silly.”

She was her father’s little girl and had his casual habit of diminishing her mother—not that Lavender ever seemed to mind. “I follow the instructions exactly,” said Angelica’s mother. “It would be a wicked waste to do otherwise. One half packet to one pint of water—as I am instructed, so I do.”

Stephen White, coming back from choir practice, would survey the shaky structure of the family dessert and say, “Flop and wobble again, my dear,” in kind affection and jump up and down to shake the room and make the confection collapse totally. Of such detail, it seemed to Angelica, good marriages were made. Those were the days when Angelica was called Jelly, her given name proving too long a word for easy saying.

But even blessings can turn out to be curses; land mines laid in a long forgotten war. “Flop and wobble,” Lady Rice had said aloud one early morning as she lay in her marriage bed beside Sir Edwin Rice. “Flop and wobble,” and indeed she was thinking of nothing but family tea and happy times, pre-adolescence, but Edwin took it as a slight, turned abruptly away from her, removing his enfolding arm, lay with his back to her for a little and then climbed out of bed and dressed. They had been married for ten years: the days of misunderstandings and makings-up were long past. Lady Rice could not think why he chose to take offense. Later she realized her husband was at this time “seeing” his cousin Anthea.

Unfaithful husbands divide into two kinds: the one feels guilty, brings flowers, baths babies, tries not to hurt: though later spoils things by confessing all. The other feels guilty but looks for justification in his wife’s behavior: see, everyone, how she fails to look after me properly, has grown fat, or undermines my self-esteem, whatever, wherever her weakness lies: but when the affair has ended—should it ever end—he keeps the secret to himself: refrains from burdening his wife with it: she has paid in advance, as it were, for his blow against the marriage politic.

This particular morning Lady Rice did what she could to explain: “flop and wobble,” she pleaded, was not a slur upon her husband’s prowess. How could he think such a thing? But indeed he had not lately been as moved by his wife as once he was, but Lady Rice supposed that to be a normal fluctuation in his sexual energies. Worries at work, perhaps. But Edwin would have none of her excuses, though Lady Rice prattled on. Edwin, usually so easily entertained, so happy to hear tales of his wife’s childhood, remained for once obdurate, unfascinated, profoundly offended.

“It’s no use,” said Edwin, when finally he spoke, “trying to deny your own words. What is spoken is what is meant, consciously or not. What you were doing is wishing impotence upon me. You’re trying to undermine my confidence again.”

“You just want to take offense,” she had wept. “Why are we having this dreadful time? What is the matter with you?” He gave her no clue. And being, as Edwin would have it, unobservant, or, as she would say, innocent, Lady Rice failed to connect her husband’s claim to martyrdom at her hands with his guilt. She was to be blamed for the crime against her. To put it bluntly, Edwin had fallen out of love with his wife and was inclined to blame her for this loss. He felt it, oddly enough, keenly, and the more keenly he felt it, the more he blamed her. What a mess!

Flop and wobble, verbal assault. Lady Rice could see what Edwin meant. No such thing as an accident; no unmeant, casual remark, was without meaning: no matter how unconscious the impulse to deride, it still existed.

“Come off it!” said Jelly. “Stop blaming yourself. You’re hopeless!”

A
NGELICA IS IN CHARGE
. Her determination to occupy the moral high ground allows no argument. If the ticket machines on the way home from the office are out of order, she will seek out an official and pay him, to his annoyance. The more she services Brian Moss the more self-righteous she becomes. She points out discrepancies in his petty cash: or a piece of spinach stuck between his front teeth: she raises her eyebrows if he comes back from lunch late. She insists on talking about his wife and his children even as her head goes down on his member.

The others can see the unwisdom of it, but there is no holding Angelica in this mood. She won’t even let the others laugh. Everything is too serious: she’s rigid with correctness. She takes them shopping at thrift shops and signs all available petitions: she saves the whale and sacrifices tuna in the interests of dolphins. She accosts a woman, a total stranger, and reproaches her at length for wearing a fur coat. She has become a vegetarian. Jelly believes she is in control but there Angelica will suddenly be, using Jelly’s mouth to speak with. It is dangerous. This unit only works by consensus.

“Brian,” Jelly finds herself saying one morning, “would you like me to put an ad in the
Times,
enquiring about the whereabouts of Una Musgrave, Tully Toffener’s mother-in-law?”

She was on her knees in front of Brian Moss. Nothing further had been said about Jelly joining the permanent staff and all agreed that in the interests of job security her boss should be kept happy.

Her mouth needed a rest; the muscles had begun to ache from overwork.

“But why?” asked Brian, startled. “Because it’s right,” said Jelly/Angelica, bleakly. Brian Moss’s erection faltered and Jelly gave up altogether. She rose and went back to her desk to write out the advertisement. He scowled and fidgeted.

“Why should you care about Tully Toffener, anyway?” asked Brian Moss. “The man’s a total freak.” He could see the transition from occasional sexual engagement to the normal master/servant relationship becoming more and more of a problem. If the intimacy went on for too long, Jelly would feel entitled to take over his conscience entirely. Wives were expected to look after that, and be damned as wet blankets, but not passing girls at the office. “Freak or not,” his secretary replied, “Tully Toffener’s your client and you are obliged to look after his interests.”

“For God’s sake,” said Jelly, “shut up.”

“It’s my duty to speak out,” said Angelica.

“We’ll lose this job if you go on,” said Angel. “Not that I mind.

There are more ways than one of earning a living.”

“Angelica is right,” said Lady Rice. “Tully and Sara Toffener sat at my dining table.”

On the same principle that some cultures believe that if you save another’s life you are then responsible for all the bad deeds they may go on to commit, so Lady Rice felt she owed Tully and Sara at least this much—that Sara’s right to inherit did not go by total default; either because Brian simply couldn’t be bothered, or because she, Jelly, sapped his strength and his interest in his work.

“And another thing,” said Angelica, “sex with a married man is totally wrong. You have to stop, Jelly.”

“Blow-jobs don’t count,” said Jelly. “Everyone knows that.”

“It’s disgusting,” said Lady Rice. “It’s sheer torture. I hate you doing it.”

“If it’s the taste you’re complaining about, put cinnamon in his coffee,” says Angel.

“Angel,” asks Lady Rice, “how do you
know
these things?”

Angel says that everything Lady Rice knows, she knows; it’s just she, Angel, will admit it and Lady Rice won’t.

“I’m not going to stop it,” says Jelly. “I don’t care what any of you say. I like the feeling of power; I like to have him helpless. Anyway, I want to ask him for a rise.”

“Do that,” says Angelica, “and we’ll get fired. Things are touch and go anyway. You just wait and see.”

Ajax suddenly says, “We Heroes of Troy were at it all the time. I loved Ulysses, and so died on my own sword. I could not bear the humiliation of betrayal.”

“Get that man out of here,” Jelly, Lady Rice and Angel shrieked at Angelica. “This is girl talk.”

“Why blame me?” asked Angelica, and they all listened carefully, but Ajax had gone. “Anyway,” added Angelica, “that’s just gender prejudice.”